Texas sides with company seeking land records via USB

JARED JANES, The Monitor (McAllen, Texas) |
November 29, 2010

An attorney general ruling that the Hidalgo County Clerk’s Office must provide access to the county’s database of electronic land records using a computer’s USB port is a major open records victory for Texas, an open government advocate said.

The Texas attorney general’s ruling capped a yearlong attempt by Houston-based Integrity Title Records to receive an electronic copy of the county’s index of title records, digital copies of each record and the maps, or plats. But the clerk’s office had refused to provide access to the records using a USB port, which Integrity could use to copy the 750 gigabytes of data onto an external storage device, said Marian Cones, a vice president for the company.

The clerk’s office denied access to the data using a USB port, saying the ports were disabled on all computers under the county’s security policy and the county’s records vendor, ACS, which prohibited it from attaching additional hardware to leased computers.

Instead, the clerk’s office offered to burn the data onto more than 1,000 CDs at a cost of nearly $90,000 to the vendor. The Attorney General, however, ruled that a USB is a storage device like a CD or a DVD and must be treated as one.

“The absence of a USB drive doesn’t mean they lack the ability to transfer data and doesn’t mean they don’t have to provide the data in the medium I request,” Cones said. “If they ran out of CDs or the copier broke, they couldn’t say they couldn’t provide records in that manner. It goes against the spirit and the letter of the law in Texas.”

Annette Muniz, the deputy county clerk, said Wednesday that the clerk’s office needed the county’s legal counsel to review the attorney general ruling before it determines how to proceed.

But she said her office’s intent wasn’t to fight the state’s Open Records Act as much as protect the county’s database. Many of the older title records that are included in the database include social security numbers that can be used to commit fraud and identity theft, she said. Permitting complete access to the database would allow private third-parties to pay for access to personal identifying information through bulk sales.

In addition, the clerk’s office views its record database -- one it paid more than $1 million to create by scanning decades of older records -- as an asset with value to county taxpayers. Under the attorney general’s ruling, the entire database can be obtained by companies elsewhere for less than $100.

The attorney general sent a letter on Nov. 18 to the clerk’s office telling it to provide the electronic information on a USB drive as requested.

Integrity Title Records, which provides customers access to a searchable database of land records for research, filed a cost complaint with the attorney general in August 2009 after the clerk’s office provided a cost estimate of $87,430 to copy the records onto CDs.

County clerk officials responded that their office did not have the “technological ability” to provide the database using a USB port because they were disabled on all computers that store the county’s official records. A verbal agreement with ACS, the vendor that manages the county’s records, also prohibits the county clerk from attaching equipment to computers leased from ACS.

But Cones, whose company has received the information from 45 other Texas counties in a similar format, said disabling the USB ports on the clerk’s computers could also lead it to disable CD drives to refuse to provide public information in that medium.

The attorney general agreed, telling the clerk’s office that it must provide a cost estimate for providing the public information using a USB drive.